E 

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3E§e ®ra,ani?oiion of JflTiBcrfp on fge Western Continent 



A N 



ORATION 



DELIVEBED BEFOBB THE 



MUNICIPAL AUTHORITIES 



CITY OF BOSTON, 



CELEBRATION OF THE SEVENTY-SIXTH ANNIVERSARY 



©ecfarafion of American 3noepenoence, 



JULY 5, 1852 



BY THOMAS STAKE KING, A.M. 



BOSTON: 

ROCKWELL AND CHURCHILL, CITY PRINTERS. 

1892. 




Class EJLJJl- 

Book J205-. 



^ U 



<E§e ©raani^aiion of BBwrfg on i§e Western Continent. 



A N 



ORATION 

DELIVERED BEFOBE THE 

MUNICIPAL AUTHORITIES 

OF THE 

CITY OF BOSTON, 

AT THE 

CELEBRATION OF THE SEVENTY-SIXTH ANNIVERSARY 

OF THE 

©ecfarafion of (American 3noepenbence, 

JULY 5, 1852. 

BY THOMAS STARK KING, A.M. 



BOSTON: 

ROCKWELL AND CHURCHILL, CITY PRINTERS. 

1892. 



,1> 



c& 



6* 



In E-x .h. 



CITY OF BOSTON. 



In Board of Aldermen, December 21, 1891. 

Whereas, The Fourth of July Oration delivered in 1852 by Rev. 
Thomas Starr King is the only one of the series since 1822 which has 
not been printed ; and as his family is willing that it should now be 
issued, 

Ordered, That the Chairman of the Record Commissioners, under the 
direction of the Committee on Printing, cause the said Oration to be 
printed, bound, and distributed; the edition to consist of fifteen hundred 
copies : and the expense, not to exceed four hundred dollars, to be 
charged to the appropriation for Printing. 

Passed. Sent down for concurrence. December 23 came up con- 
curred. 

Approved by the Mayor December 26, 1891. 

A true copy. 

Attest : 

John T. Priest, Asst. City Clerk. 



o 



PREFACE 



Thomas Stare King was born in the city of New 
York, Dec. 17, 1824, his father being the Rev. Thomas F. 
King, and his mother Susan Starr, both natives of that city. 
His father became the pastor of a church in Charlestown, 
where he died before his son was qualified to enter college. 
The young man however continued his studies while serv- 
ing as a public school teacher and clerk in the Navy Yard, 
and in September 1846 he succeeded Rev. E. H. Chapin 
in the pulpit which his father had occupied. In December 
1848 he married Miss Julia M. Wiggin, and soon after was 
installed at Hollis-street church, Boston, where he continued 
for eleven years. His popularity as a preacher and lecturer 
was very great, and few men have gained more devoted or 
appreciative friends. 

"It was," says Dr. Henry W. Bellows, "the hidden, 
interior man of the heart, the invisible character behind all 
the rich possessions, intellectual and social, of this gifted 
man, that gave him his real power and skill to control the 
wills, and to move the hearts, and to win the unbounded 
confidence and affection of his fellow-beings." 

In 1860, Mr. King accepted a call from a church in San 
Francisco. His fame as a lecturer as well as a preacher 
had preceded him, and he was called upon to visit all parts 
of our western coast. At the outbreak of the Rebellion he 
was thus in a position to exert a great influence upon the 
public of California, then tempted by the suggestion of a 
Pacific republic. No one who reads the pages of this 



4 PREFACE . 

oration can doubt the energy or the eloquence with which 
Mr. King combatted this heresy, nor the unflinching sup- 
port which he gave to the cause of the Union. " He went 
forth appealing to the people taking the constitution and 
Washington for his text," and he is confessedly entitled to 
the credit of having preserved the Pacific states to the 
Union. 

In January 1864 his new church edifice was dedicated, 
but after a brief illness with diphtheria he died March 4, 
1864. 

Mr. King published in 1859 a well-known book in regard 
to the White Hills, whose beauties were his favorite theme, 
and which, in a popular sense, he almost discovered. Sev- 
eral volumes of his sermons were printed after his death ; 
but during his life-time his compositions were reserved for 
use on the lecture-platform. It was owing to this fact, that 
the following Oration was not published as usual, at the date 
of its delivery, by the City of Boston. Finding recently 
that this was the only one in the series of Fourth of July 
Orations, delivered by request of the City of Boston, which 
had not been printed, application was made to the widow 
and children of Mr. King, and their consent was readily 
given to the publication. The manuscript was found to be 
in perfect form, and only one or two verbal corrections 
have been needed. 

w. h. w. 
City Hall, Boston, March 4, 1892. 



THE ORGANIZATION OF LIBERTY ON THE 
WESTERN CONTINENT. 



Mr. Mayor and Fellow-citizens: 

The seventy-sixth anniversary of the day which 
proclaimed our country a distinct and independent 
power on the earth has dawned upon us. And it 
finds us in such prosperity and peace, and such 
rapidly increasing greatness, that our thoughts are 
invited to rise in adoration and gratitude to Him 
who "hath not dealt so with any nation," and 
whose favor alone is permanent strength. 

The topic to which I shall ask your attention is 
the "Organization of Liberty on the Western 
Continent." In connection with this theme the 
Fourth of July at once assumes its real impor- 
tance in our whole history, and unveils its high- 
est claim to our reverent memory and lasting 
gratitude. 

The day is distinguished by its historical mar- 
riage with the Declaration of Independence ; but 
it is not the production of that vigorous revo- 
lutionary rhetoric that we celebrate. Literature 
abounds with denunciations of oppressions and 



6 ORATION. 

assertions of human worth and rights, that have 
higher quality than the periods of our venerated 
state paper, and yet we do not dignify them 
with national holidays. We venerate the Declara- 
tion as a deed more than as a composition or a 
collection of doctrines. It was a bold blow for 
the liberty of three millions of people; and we 
should honor the noble manner in which the 
deed was done, — the deliberate and solid states- 
manship that comprehended the responsibilities, 
and took upon its shoulders the duties of such 
a radical position, — more than the words and the 
deed together. 

In fact, the whole Revolution itself is not of 
any great importance in military history as a 
series of battles and a protest of physical force. 
Its achievements in the field are immortalized 
by the cause it served and the manner of the 
service. Our revolution was turned into a dig- 
nified force instead of a flash of enthusiasm and 
a rattle of musketry, by the compact, passive 
resistance of character and the moral fidelity to 
the cause, in privation and suffering, manifested 
all over the land; through these qualities it stood 
in right relations with the gravity of our earlier 
history, and offered no obstructions, but power- 
ful aid rather, to the completion of the destiny to 



JULY 5, 1852. 7 

which from the first our land was pledged — 
the peaceful organization of Liberty. 

Let us glance for a moment at the physical 
universe, and catch a few of the broad instruc- 
tions given in it, as to the relative value of 
the process of organization. Nature is not sat- 
isfied with a boundless treasury of elements and 
a happy balance of them into inorganic har- 
monies. She sends up a chorus of praise to 
God as the organizer as well as creator; for her 
materials are combined into forms, and the spirit 
that superintends our world revels in varieties of 
form that defy numeration. 

The globe we live on is thoroughly organized 
by an array of antagonistic forces, and is made 
to play as a wheel of a celestial orrery. The 
clouds, the tides, the winds, are wrapped by 
laws, and made through their movement and 
their oscillations to manifest subtle harmonies 
that cannot be broken. Yea, even the light is 
made to obey a steady rein, and to be punc- 
tual as time, and exact as mathematics, in the 
dispensation of its floods. The dancing light is 
not suffered to be capricious and fitful in its 
visitations, but is required to be dutiful, and so 
that it shall break here and there in flashes, or 
stream in vivid sheets now and then athwart 



8 ORATION. 

the darkness. Nature builds a huge home for 
it, stretches the immense diameter and bends the 
solid arches of the sun, whose gravitation poises 
a colony of planets, and around that rocky orb 
she winds the vesture of flame that is to light 
and warm the globes that reach from Mercury 
to Neptune. The steps of the vast annals of 
nature are marked by rising grades of organiza- 
tion. Each new stratum is deposited as the con- 
dition and abode of a higher animated structure; 
and at last the supreme skill embodied in the 
frame of man announces that the periods of geo- 
logical development are passed. 

And in history the great work is that of 
social organization. Providence designs that 
there shall be not only myriads of persons on 
his globe, but also civil and social structures, 
by which individuals shall be disposed in right 
relations, and many members become one body. 
The organization of justice, therefore, is the 
task which is proposed to the human race. It 
has steadily struggled up through the centuries 
towards the attainment of it; and the cheering 
epochs of history are those when greater ad- 
vances are made and new successes permanently 
gained. 

The student delights to retreat by his sym- 



JULY 5, 1852. 9 

pathies into such luminous seasons of the past 
as when the Greek intellect was busy in the 
organization of beauty in statues, temples, elo- 
quence, and verse; or the Egyptian genius was 
throwing up from the sombre depths of its 
sense of the Infinite, the Sphinx, the pyramids, 
and the wild literature of future judgment and 
transmigration; or when the sinews of Roman 
valor and statesmanship were opening paths to 
the possession of the world; or when Italy was 
feeding the eyes of Europe with the rapid 
wonders of her chisel and the magic of her 
brush: but though less fascinating to poetic sen- 
sibilities, those are the most eminent most 
grand and most powerful epochs of civilization 
when some great institutions loom up shaped by 
the skill of many hands, beneficient in their 
purpose and their agency, standing on the firm 
basis of right and supporting themselves by 
their own symmetry. 

We shall be confirmed in this view of history 
from whatever quarter we study it. Regarding 
it as philosophers and watching for the advance of 
truth, we shall see that no triumph of truth is so 
important and so enduring as when it domesticates 
itself in strong institutions and becomes en- 
trenched in the habits of race. Regarding it 



10 ORATION. 

religiously, and anxious for the victory of right, 
we must see that there is no conquest so valu- 
able as when justice descends into the practical 
life of an age, and builds its massive defences 
around men, investing them with rights which 
by general consent are considered sacred as 
their personality. Or if we look at history as 
philanthropists, still the most important and 
gratifying seasons will seem to be those when 
the welfare of men is something more than a 
matter of sentiment and sympathy, but is pro- 
tected by the might of law and hedged by 
generous statutes. 

The man who, by the more quiet methods 
of personal influence, organizes in the world a 
dumb institution, does vastly more than he whose 
radical eloquence sets the deformities of societ} 7 
and life in the blaze of an angry idea. The 
foundation of a charity school is a more mem- 
orable event than the most eloquent invective 
that could be preached against the selfish use 
of riches; a new Christian character in which 
religious truth is freshly embodied is a more 
precious contribution to the world than a new 
theory of holiness. History does not take ac- 
count of all the hazy theories that stain the 
night air of time with transient radiance, any 



JULY 5, 1852. 11 

more than the charts of Astronomy make account 
of the Boreal flashes and the meteors that adorn 
the winter nights with their fitful and fantastic 
fire. It is only when a theory or an intel- 
lectual movement, ceasing to be a superficial 
phenomenon, becomes a vital power, — a subject 
not for cool geometrical measurements, but a 
dynamic energy — and spreading through the intel- 
lect of genius and the sympathies of the people, 
(as in the case of the principles uttered in the 
Reformation, and by the first Wesleyan preach- 
ers), manifests itself as a constructive force 
and adds new institutions to the social land- 
scape, which are vital from the core, that it 
marks another hour in the advance of the race. 
How easy is it to start a priori, and reason- 
ing down from some exalted abstract principles 
to condemn and scout the injustice that is 
woven in with society, or by putting together 
a few ideas to sketch out a perfect plan of 
state, and home, and church. It is pastime for our 
reveries. But to make our criticisms available; 
to give our dreams a fulcrum by which they 
can start rooted disorders; to make our reveries 
practical and congruous with facts of human 
nature, and laws of the world : we had better 
try that work before we set up claims to wis- 



12 ORATION. 

dom. There is no more marvellous manifesta- 
tion of human superiority than the ability to put 
an advance political notion in practice, so that 
the machine will play easily and obey the cal- 
culated laws. What an expenditure of perfect 
philosophies before a new and higher fact is 
born! Humanity burns up tons of books to get 
light enough for one step ahead. 

Alas ! gentlemen, it is not the mere existence of 
steam, either in the social or the physical world, 
that works wonders for humanity. It is very 
easy to have steam. A little water, a match, 
some charcoal, and a tea-kettle, supply all the 
conditions for raising it, so that an enthusiast 
may descant at leisure upon its properties, and 
enjoy its prophetic and eloquent hiss. But before 
the steam era in the world history begins, the 
engine must appear out of the resources of 
some practical organizing brain, and offer its 
sinewy and complicated body for that intense, 
vapory soul. 

In the light of this analogy we say that the 
peculiarity of our own history is the steady and 
peaceful process of organization which it reveals, 
and by which higher political truth, which the 
world considered dangerous, was vindicated as 
practical by being slowly clothed in fact. 



JULY 5, 1852. 13 

Other nations have looked back to a dim an- 
tiquity for their origin. The story of their 
growth has been that of struggle through bar- 
barisms and superstitions, and against wrongs 
and errors that were entrenched behind cen- 
turies of prescription and habit. The changes 
for the better have been slow, and have cost 
immense effort and sacrifice. Principles have 
dawned and then darkened, perhaps drowned, as 
they rise, in the red mist of war. Explo- 
sions have scattered and wasted the beneficent 
forces of progress; lapses of popular virtue have 
sunk the hopes that were justified by rising 
truth; and the general picture given to us is 
that of a feeble germ of order, striving slowly 
against a chaotic mass of passion, prejudice, 
ignorance, and wrong, by which it is often de- 
feated, and into which up to the present time 
it has succeeded in throwing but few of its 
threads of regulated liberty. 

Until the Saxon colonization of this continent, 
such was the stereotyped form of national ex- 
perience. But with the new theatre of action 
prepared by Providence, a new work was imposed. 
There was a slow process of discovering great 
principles, after the foundations of our society 
were laid, and then a fierce contest for their first 



14 ORATION. 

existence on our soil. The old forces and con- 
ditions of progress with which Europe had been 
acquainted, — strife of class against class for new 
power or old privilege, civil war, compromise, 
foreign pressure, and the shifting attitudes of 
diplomacy, — have had no appreciable, certainly 
no important, effect upon our progress; it has 
been a rapid development of a few vigorous 
convictions and principles into form. It has 
been growth like that of an oak from its seed, 
by gradual absorption of heat, air, and moisture, 
with the occasional assistance of a storm. We 
are accustomed to speak of our great struggle 
as the War of Revolution, but strictly speaking 
it was the War of Separation only; for it did 
not bring any new organic principle into the 
field of our politics, but was a resistance to the 
obstructions that cramped the swelling energies of 
our fundamental convictions. ]STo one of our 
constructive ideas has ever been quickened by 
the angry sacrifice of blood drawn by intestine 
war. 

The last two centuries have been the most 
remarkable of the world's history for the amount 
of social justice that has been established for 
millions of men; and the fullest experience of 
it has been on this continent, secured by the in- 



JULY 5, 1852. 15 

stitutions which have made our country an original 
experiment and spectacle in the annals of time. 
To a scientific mind, a Humboldt or an Owen, 
no tidings would be freighted with such ab- 
sorbing interest as the information that a new 
and high type of organization had arisen on 
this planet; that the creative powers around us 
had given birth to some beautiful planet, some 
majestic tree, some strange and symmetrical ani- 
mal, with higher functions and more intricate 
constitution than any vegetable or physical or- 
ganization known to the lists of science. With 
what reverence would their minds bend before 
such a glorious miracle; and how eager, how cu- 
rious and minute, would their researches be into the 
wisdom embodied in this last and highest creation 
of the intellect that rules the world ! 

We all know what excitement was caused, a 
few years since, by the discovery of a new planet 
beyond the path of Uranus. But what would 
the amazement of an astronomer be if he could 
detect in the sky a planet in the swift process 
of formation? Or what if he could look through 
his glass into some sacred district of space and 
see a vast continent of chaos organize itself 
rapidly into an orderly system; if every process 
by which planets and satellites are formed out 



16 OEATION. 

of primeval matter, could be made visible, and 
the forces which upon our globe have so slowly 
deposited the landmarks of geological ages should 
condense their work into a few years, so that 
he could study it at leisure, night by night, 
noting each week some stage of advance which 
on our globe exhausted a thousand centuries, 
and seeing all ending in the production of a 
beauty which our globe and our system do not 
wear ? What privilege would be accounted equal 
to this by an earnest, scientific mind, and how 
much more clearly would the study of such a 
creative process of nature reveal what the physi- 
cal forces are, than any abstract description could 
convey; and how much deeper and more solemn 
the impression of such a spectacle than dry 
statements, chemical hypotheses and mathematical 
formulas ! 

And so our history is most interesting and 
suggestive when viewed as a fresh creation from 
the deeps of human nature that had long been 
sluggish, and whose vitality seemed to be eifete. 
The appearance of our mighty millions of white 
democracy, stretched from ocean to ocean and 
from the Russian latitudes to the Tropical Gulf, 
without a monarch, with no hereditary rulers, no 
lords, no titles, no vested rights, no despotic 



JULY 5, 1862. 17 

Church, but blest with an order such as the world 
has never seen, and a prosperity that has outrun 
every enthusiastic dream, and yet not exhausting 
more than half a century in the revelation of 
most startling results, — what is it to the political 
student but a process parallel to the picture we 
imagined, of an evolving system of worlds in 
space before the eye of an astronomer, a mag- 
nificent and astonishing effort of organization, 
unexampled in human experience for the breadth 
of the scale, the rapidity of the development, 
and the character of the products, and revealing 
as nothing else has ever done or could do, the 
constructive powers that slumber in the popular 
brain and heart. 

Many of the facts of our history in which 
the Old World was concerned, catch a provi- 
dential hue, when seen, from the principle that 
this continent was wanted for new organizations 
of society. We see a pregnant coincidence in 
the fact that the colonization did not begin till 
after the Protestant reformation had established 
itself, and that the Spaniards found no motives 
to claim and people the northern seaboard. A 
light is thrown upon the strenuous struggle of 
England and France in relation to a portion of 
our territory; the great expenditure of blood 



18 ORATION. 

and treasure; and the skilful diplomacy which 
drove the French from the valley of the Ohio, — 
thus preparing the way for the consolidation of 
the American colonies, — giving them a friend in 
the government of France, while it banished 
from the great Western domains a race too 
much incumbered with the traditions of the past 
and too feeble in the faculties of organization 
to be worthy or able to dot that fresh country 
with new forms of government and society. Es- 
pecially we are called to study reverently the 
process by which the Protestant world was 
first sifted and winnowed, till the choicest germs 
of character were found strong enough to send 
out the shoots of lasting institutions on a hard 
soil and under a hostile sky. 

Nothing strikes the student with more force, 
as he looks back over the rise of our republic, 
than the small proportion of published or medi- 
tated theorizing about the rights of man, the 
province of government, and the destiny of our 
race, compared with the actual results that are 
visible. We have already intimated that there 
are two great classes of men related to the 
world's progress. One class are fine critics of 
social disorder and injustice in the light of 
favorite ideas. They are accurate analysts; per- 



JULY 5, 1852. 19 

haps they are able to make outlines and draughts 
of a polity or society that would exclude most 
of the evils that oppress mankind; but they 
have no force in the world. They cannot 
interest men in their plans, and the moment they 
come in contact with the real forces of society 
and human nature they and their theories are 
powerless as babes. All their energy runs to 
the brain and expends itself through the voice 
and the proportions of a theory. 

If the world were made of paper, if ink were the 
life-blood of the universe, and things were no 
deeper than a mathematician's diagram, they would 
be the hope and salvation of the race. But the 
world is made up of something quite different 
from paper; and so we may rejoice that there 
is another class of men who have far less skill 
in theories, but far greater constructive capacity 
in the world of facts, men of influence, men 
who, wherever you place them, become centres 
of force, and soon dispose men and circum- 
stances into an order where they move with 
more harmony and efficiency. Compared with 
the class first named, these last are as the seed 
of a tree in contrast with a clear description 
of it, or the chemical formulas of what its 
substance is. To use a sentence of Carlyle, 



20 ORATION. 

"there is in them what transcends all logic 
utterance, a congruity with the unuttered." 
They live, and, "institutions are their lengthened 
shadows." Need I say that the men who first 
colonized the Plymouth sands and the shores of 
Boston bay were of the latter stamp. They 
had not spent much time in reveries about 
liberty as an ideal goddess. They came to labor 
as soon as they stepped upon the soil, with the 
undertone of conviction that freedom, as a work- 
ing power, — a Hercules rather than an Apollo, 
a hero of toil, more than a patron of theories and 
dreams, — was to use them as the first channels 
through which its creative energy could pour itself 
into new forms for the benefit of many generations. 
The men who stepped upon the bleak shores 
of New England had been so trained by hard- 
ship and oppression that every free sentiment 
their breasts harbored was as stubborn as their 
ribs, and every idea of rights which their 
heads supported had roots that were twisted in 
the sub-soil of their being. The strength of their 
faith in liberty could not be expressed in dec- 
lamation or treatise; wherever they lived the 
effluence of their characters would have purified 
the social air, and their daily work have assisted 
the establishment of social righteousness. 



JULY 5, 1852. 21 

Let us imagine an intelligent man, wholly 
ignorant of our earliest annals, but aware that 
the institutions and power of this country are 
the products of the last two centuries, beginning 
an examination of the primitive records of the 
New England settlements. Would he not expect 
to find some clearly outlined scheme of a great 
State and a Briarean government ? Would he 
not confidently search for the sketch of. a civil 
constitution and a theory of political equality 
and balances which the colonists determined that 
the forests should make way for, and the wise 
labor of their posterity strengthen and extend ? 
How surprised would he be to discover that 
there were no such schemes; that the vessels 
that discharged the colonists were disburthened 
of no such theories ! Or rather, the theories 
were in the blood of the men themselves. 

What they sought and determined to gain was a 
few fundamental rights that would hedge their 
manhood and their faith. They wanted a simple, 
social structure, humble as their log-huts and 
Puritan chapels, that would house a prosperous 
and pious community and a peaceful brotherhood. 
They were not furious for the aggressive estab- 
lishment of a social philosophy; their vitality had 
not been expended brain-wards in shaping and 



22 ORATION. 

perfecting the ideal proportions of a pet theory. 
They had no more decided the minutiae of their 
policy than they had decided on what spot they 
would put their dwellings; and so they had the 
immense advantage of grappling directly with 
circumstances by the working passions of men 
and the strong forces of their common sense, 
from which, in its purification by suffering, the 
crusts of feudal prejudice had dropped. 

How much better for humanity that a Carver, 
a Winthrop, or a Brewster, were landed here 
with their circles of friends, than that the parti- 
sans of some Plato's " Republic," or Harrington's 
" Oceana," or Owen's " Harmony," had been dis- 
embarked ! Each one of the men who were sent 
by Providence was a vitalized treatise, a seed 
corn of better societies and new ages. They 
came to build the institutions of the future, not 
by copying from any comprehensive, sharp-lined, 
radical vision, but by discharging into their first 
work a flood of rough vitality that could not 
but swell beyond its rind and gather larger 
structures for its home. They labored for the future 
and undreamed America as the beavers understand 
masonry and statics; and like the bees, the tiny 
Paxtons of entomology, whose geometry is not 
learned from Euclid but pervades their substance. 



JULY 5, 1852. 23 

They had, too, the balance of powers that is 
necessary to every vigorous and lasting struc- 
ture of society. They were bold, very bold, but 
not too bold. ~No set of men, however logical 
their protests against false habits and base laws, 
however clear their perceptions of truthful prin- 
ciples, can put much vital force into a new con- 
structive movement if they are not consecrated 
and loyal men; if, in the centre of their being, 
they do not account themselves as subjects and 
instruments, and look toward some quarter of 
the Infinite with the shaded gaze of worship. 
In our ancestors, their faith, their courage, and 
the licentious iconoclasm to which the fresh 
forests might have invited their sense of wrong, 
were steadied and corrected by their reverence. 
They were not so out of patience with the past 
and with the land that had wronged them, that 
they could not appreciate its real wisdom, and 
be content to use what had worked well in 
their own country's experience. Repelled by the 
bitter experience of persecution from many of 
the ideas and social principles which were in- 
woven with the structure of society in the Old 
World, their minds swung with the centrifugal 
force of a planet towards a new order; and yet 



24 ORATION. 

were bolted, by an energy firm and still as 
the centripetal rein, to a regular track. 

It is fortunate that they did not come here 
with any schemes based on a dissection of 
human nature, and strive to anticipate centuries, 
if not to wrestle against the truth, by building 
a social fabric on the results of a shadowy an- 
alysis. They had not, like Fourier and his dis- 
ciples, made any scientific inventory of the 
possible constructive powers of our nature, which 
they were eager to reflect in a community. If 
they had, the aboriginal communities in the 
American forests of wild cats, partridges and 
raccoons, would have received little detriment 
from a spreading civilization. 

Instead of such an aim they affirmed the responsi- 
bilities of authorities. They had constructed no 
schemes of " hypominor " groups and K hyperminor " 
series in a perfect society, nor of "passional dom- 
inants " and " passional tonics," nor of the low 
accords and the cardinal accords of friendship, nor 
of the relative rank of ambition, love, and "fami- 
lism " as forces in the state; but they struck for 
the intervention of the people in public affairs. 
They had not speculated finally about the pre- 
cise ties that should connect the individual and 
the state, but they looked out for personal 



JULY 5, 1852. 25 

liberty, and they guaranteed trial by jury. The 
scheme of a phalanstery, in which children should 
be swung in a community of cradles, and trained 
from their " initial crisis " to their " citerior tran- 
sition," (that is, from the moment when the baby 
gown is wanted to the time when the jacket 
shows symptoms of development), had never 
entered their heads; but they knew how to 
make the home sacred with the spirit of piety, 
and to startle nature with the humble architec- 
ture of the public school. No visions of land- 
scapes laid out in geometrical order and propor- 
tioned nicely to the tastes of the cultivators 
had woven themselves out of the gossamer 
tissue into which truth may be unravelled by a 
diseased analysis, but they provided that roads 
should be built, and that land should not be 
prevented from partition by laws of primogeni- 
ture. They could not have conceived such fine- 
spun harmonies of structure in an ideal state 
as Plato outlined and St. Simon meditated, but 
they knew how to fix the running gear of a 
social order that should give a larger degree of 
homely justice than the world had imagined 
possible; they knew how to give beneficent 
power to grand juries, constables, and judges; 
how to apjDoint registrars, clerks, and surveyors; 



26 ORATION. 

how to hedge the town-meeting with solemn 
forms, and to keep a determined eye on the 
Habeas Oorjnis. Coming out of ages of feudal- 
ism and despotism, they had the sturdy sense 
"to ordain the maximum of administration and 
the minimum of government," "to keep power 
as much as possible in the hands of those most 
disposed to suffer from its abuses ; " and to place 
the conservative element, (as Mr. Hillard has so 
wisely and so happily said,) "not in the limita- 
tion of political rights, but in the multiplication 
of political trusts." 

The founders of our land organized the Ameri- 
can township, the grandest practical movement 
of the human intellect hitherto made in society, 
since it reversed the old methods by which po- 
litical existence and civil rights had been slowly 
communicated from the superior classes downward, 
and affirmed them for the whole people, and 
guarded each man's possession of them by the 
magic ring of law. This was the archetypal 
leaf which contained the secret of the structure 
of the plant, the primitive cell which throughout 
nature is the nucleus from which the highest 
organisms start, and by the multiplication of 
which they are easily formed. So great was the 
genius shown in the structure of these town- 



JULY 5, 1852. 27 

ships, and so vast and far-reaching their im- 
portance, that De Tocqueville's eulogy is justified, 
— " The boldest theories of the human reason 
were put into practice by a community so humble 
that no statesman condescended to attend to it; 
and a legislation without precedent was produced 
off-hand by the imagination of the citizens." 

From the township the county was developed, 
and gradually the lineaments of an organized 
colony began to show themselves through the 
practical application of the idea of representative 
government, which another French writer of our 
century has called " one of the few great dis- 
coveries that among the moderns has created a new 
universe." From the earliest times and in every 
colony there seems to have been something in 
the air and soil of America to foster the idea 
of representative power as a first principle of 
American thought. We should all be acquainted 
with the quaint phrases in which an old histo- 
rian informs us concerning Virginia, that, "In 
1620 a house of burgesses broke out in the Col- 
ony." Such an enuption shows us what was the 
quality of the popular blood. What does it teach 
us but that the flushes of indignation at threat- 
ened oppression in the first settlements were not 
destructive but creative movements, opening legal 



28 ORATION. 

and orderly channels for their vent ? What was 
this strange eruption but the blush of American 
expression upon the infant countenance of the 
body politic, which was to be confirmed and 
stamped into it as a characteristic in coming 
years ? The same historian writes, too, that in 
Massachusetts, " although there is no color for it 
in the Charter, a House of Deputies suddenly ap- 
peared in 1634, to the surprise of the Magis- 
trates and the disappointment of their scheme 
for power." Whence could such a beneficient 
apparition have started but from the deeps of 
the American passion for freedom, which has 
proved itself wiser than all the schemes of stu- 
dious critics of liberty, and which thus far has 
known how to meet every emergency from the 
resources of its organizing common sense ? 

There is something quite amusing in the 
tone with which Massachusetts met the proposi- 
tion of friendly Lords in England to grant 
them and their families hereditary honors, if 
they should remove to this land. The proposi- 
tion was not met by any clear argument against 
the injustice of it, or its discordance with their 
plans of society; it was rebutted by an odd 
expression of reverence which showed more con- 
vincingly than the most forcible logic could, how 



JULY a, 1852. 29 

hopeless was the prospect of transplanting such 
honors into American respect; — "When God 
blesseth any branch of any noble or generous 
family with a spirit and gifts fit for government, 
it would be a taking of God's name in vain to 
put such a talent under a bushel, and a sin 
against the honor of magistracy to neglect such 
in our public elections. But if God should not 
delight to furnish some of their posterity with 
gifts fit for magistracy, we should expose them 
and the Commonwealth to reproach and preju- 
dice, if we should call them forth, when God 
doeth not, to public authority." A fresh, cool 
blast of political truth setting back upon the 
sickly air of Europe from the pious democracy 
of the wilderness ! 

Various as were the forms of colonial consti- 
tution in America, and however contrary the 
claim might be to the letter and spirit of the 
charters, representative government was insisted 
on as a fundamental necessity, indispensable to the 
control of their own interests and the security 
of future freedom. Struck to the earth by the 
oppressions of the Old World, the Saxon Antaeus 
rose up from contact with the aboriginal soil, 
surcharged with this instinct of representative 
rights, which was yet to prove fatal to his foe. 



30 ORATION. 

Rhode Island attained and kept it; Connecticut 
organized it; Virginia, as we have seen, grasped 
it, and would not let it go; New York clung 
to it with vigor: and the struggle through 
which the Carolinas insisted on and secured it 
showed that it must be an organizing principle 
of the continent. 

Nothing, indeed, can illustrate more brilliantly 
the difference between a theoretical legislation, 
however symmetrical its proportions, and that 
which has the vital spirit of a people in it 
and therefore is good for them because it fits 
them, than the reception given by the people 
of Carolina to the constitution drafted for them 
by Shaftesbury the statesman and Locke the 
philosopher. Viewed as a play of some of the 
best European notions of liberty into pure 
space, a leisurely exercise in political mathe- 
matics by reflective men immured in their 
libraries, it was no doubt a pleasant exercise 
to draw its outline; and if it had been applied 
to men without passions, a colony of human 
puppets, no doubt the machinery would have run 
without much friction. In the study of a philo- 
sophical lord what could be finer and more 
symmetrical than the division of Carolina into 
equal counties, with an Earl and two Barons 



JULY 5, 1852. 31 

for each, to whom a large portion of the land 
was forever deeded; the elective franchise con- 
ferred on freeholders of fifty acres; an aristo- 
cratic court to superintend the press: and a 
Parliament to which only large land-holders were 
eligible. But the social diagrams and the 
titles that looked so fine on English parchment 
could not be repeated in American fact. The 
soil would not support a Landgrave; the counties 
refused hospitality in their landscapes to a 
Baron's palace and estate: and the people found 
that they could not work at all in the artistic 
vestures of law which philosophy had cut and 
stitched for them. They resisted the blessing 
upon which so much philosophic ink and oil 
had been expended, and it was not many years 
before the model which, in England, as we read, 
"was esteemed by all judicious persons without 
compare," but under which the Carolinas had 
not known one day of real enjoyment, was 
forever abandoned, and the inhabitants trusted to 
their own wisdom and the organic power of 
their own sense of justice, as superior to all 
that scientific and foreign skill could accomplish 
in their behalf. 

It was of great importance to the nobility 
and success of our revolution that there had 



32 ORATION. 

been this steady, organizing force in the country 
from its earliest date. For it gave body to that 
struggle; it enabled the people to comprehend it 
from the first; it gave them something to grasp 
as an object for which to sacrifice, and to have 
a steady passion and a systematic enthusiasm 
for: and thus their devotion was saved from 
souring into a mad idea of popular discontent, 
suspicion, and ferocity, as all long contentions 
for embodied principles are sure at last to do. 
It is fortunate for us that it was not the rights 
of man, but the rights of men, that the Revolu- 
tion affirmed and defended. In the felicitous 
language of the orator * whose admirable pro- 
duction adorned this occasion two years ago, 
? the people fought for ideas that were facts and 
liberties that were laws.' 

The next great step in the process of organi- 
zation was through the blood, the storm, and 
the sacrifice of the Revolution, by which the 
colonies, achieving independence, rose to be 
American States. He who would know the 
glory of the struggle which this day commemo- 
rates, must study the quickening influence it 
exerted upon the republican principle in the land, 
so that it suddenly sprung into higher and 
vigorous forms. In most of the colonies, what- 

* Edwin P. Whipple's Oration, p. 8, line 5. 



JULY 5, 1852. 33 

ever aristocratic and feudal elements and preju- 
dices lingered in the public mind, speedily 
disappeared during the progress of the struggle 
or at its close. The Tories were the scape- 
goats that bore away into banishment all the 
sentiment of that character that might lead the 
communities into public sin. The very statute 
books shook themselves free of all legislation 
that interfered with popular supremacy. It was 
not through violent disruptions and earth- 
quake throes of society, but peacefully, that our 
Democracy rose to its lasting empire. Even 
those whose interests were invaded by it offered 
no obstacles, when the revolution was over, to 
the full organizing sweep of the dominant idea. 
Its battle-grounds were conventions; its contests 
were speeches; its weapons were votes; its 
victories were laws: and public prosperity is the 
constant ovation it receives. 

What a feature of our history is this, that all 
the experience and all the laws of society on the 
other continent have been contradicted and over- 
ridden in our growth; and while not a single privi- 
lege or right of the people in other countries has 
been gained at less expense than violent shocks 
and agitations, and the shedding of rivers of blood, 
here the germ of liberty planted on a thin and 



34 ORATION. 

frozen soil, has run through its upward stages 
without let or hinderance from ourselves, by the 
forth-putting power of its own life, revealing the 
gradual progress of its theory by some new 
shoot of institution or statute and showing in 
our history, through a process slightly less peace- 
ful than the growing harvest, "first the blade, 
then the ear, after that the full corn in the 
ear." Sans Culotte-ism, as Carlyle describes it, 
came up into French society, like a fiend from 
the pit, snorting fire, and screaming to the 
terror-smitten nation "What will you do with 
me? " But from the ocean deeps of our history, 
through the blood-stained foam of the Revolu- 
tion, rose the Republican Aphrodite, perfect in 
her proportions, blessing the day with a peace- 
ful smile, whose presence the land she stepped 
upon rejoiced in, yielding the green herbs to 
her soft and delicate tread. 

And now our attention must be given to 
the last and crowning stage of organization. 
The idea of a union among the colonies had 
floated through the popular mind, and it was 
gradually shaping itself into distinctness for 
years. There was the dim but deepening feel- 
ing, inspired by Providence, that the work of 
organization to which this continent was dedi- 



JULY 5, 1852. 35 

cated, would not be fulfilled till a central struc- 
ture rose, that should represent the power and 
harmonize the interests of the lesser republics 
that were clustered on the soil. It was proph- 
esied by the early union among the colonies of 
New England. Faint suggestions of the neces- 
sity of it were fostered by the growing oppres- 
sions of the parent land, making the colonies 
thrill with a common vexation and a common 
consciousness of wrong. A conception of it 
engaged the practical and patriotic brain of 
Franklin, and at one time was favorably viewed 
even in England. The peril of liberty in the 
years preceding the revolutionary outbreak acted 
as a consolidating pressure. 

The general interests and passions, during the 
war, found a representative focus in the hall of the 
Continental Congress. In the confederation that 
succeeded, a stanch and legal bond was sought, for 
amity and power; but it was not wisely enough con- 
structed to unify interests, and sectional passions 
and jealousies soon made ominous breaches in it. 
War was over; peace had come; but where was 
the one America that should have stood out shapely 
and strong, after the storm had blown away ? 
The temple of western liberty was yet unroofed. 
The rock had been laid bare for its corner- 



36 ORATION. 

stones; its foundations had been laid by a glori- 
ous company of workmen Avhose masonry needed 
no repair; its majestic columns had been raised 
in such stately strength, and with such various 
ornament, that the love of beauty and power in 
those who gazed upon them found little that 
was lacking; its peaceful enclosures were filled 
with thousands and hundreds of thousands 
whose fathers had laid the stubborn base and 
built the floors, and whose own genius and valor 
had lifted the pillars and carried up the walls. 

But the covering of the vast edifice had 
baffled the skill of the architects. The Articles 
of Confederation were but an unsightly tent 
which the winds and the rain soon stripped into 
ribbons, leaving the multitudes unhoused under 
the fierce sunlight, the night skies, and the 
storm. Shall the constructive genius of the 
land prove unequal to this culminating problem ? 
Has the victorious war imposed a duty which 
the conquerors cannot meet ? Is the spectacle of 
shattered Germany and fragmentary Italy to be 
repeated in the unconstellated and hostile lights 
of the western firmament ? and must the promise 
of our history and the pointings of Providence, 
and the hope of every preceding struggle, be 
fruitless, and the expectation of the world be 



JULY 5, 1852. 37 

denied its satisfaction ? ISTo, the intellect of the 
land is equal to the most difficult scheme of 
organization. For the great builders have gone 
aloft to consider the plans of a fitting super- 
structure, lie is at their head whose sword 
bore no terror to the liberty which his military 
genius saved from foreign injury, and whose 
organizing character lifts the name of Washington 
higher than the fellowship of camps to the 
selectest list of statesmen. And now the mighty 
rafters of the Constitution rise, to be stretched 
from pillar to pillar across the walls ; and see ! 
the immense and glorious dome of the national 
government arches over the space below, to give 
shelter to the thronged and joyous multitudes, 
and from the staff that crowns it streams the 
banner of the One Republic, the last and great- 
est creation of a race in history. 

Let it be our prayer that the dome thus raised 
may cover and crown the edifice for ages, that the 
flag which streams from its summit, stained though 
it is with many spots, shall float there, that the 
winds and the storms of public sentiment may 
wash it clean; knowing that the edifice is incom- 
plete and weak without its coping and its roof, and 
that if the summit fall, it must be to the ruin of 
the walls and the burial of thousands by its crash. 



38 ORATION. 

Within our own generation the capacity of 
our country for the organization of liberty has 
made itself brilliantly manifest, and has won 
many triumphs. We have become so accustomed 
to the facts that we are not startled by the 
marvel which the facts reveal; but if we could 
look at it with fresh eyes and in the light of 
any other history than our own, we should see 
that our western colonization and the institutions 
that have kept pace with it, are so surprising 
that they might almost be accounted miraculous. 
When we see those mighty living tides of Eng- 
lish, German, Irish, and Scandinavian emigration 
flowing westward and crystallizing as they flow 
into beautiful social order, where shall we turn 
to find anything in history by which it can be 
paralleled or even understood ? What is there in 
annals of time that will compare with the joy- 
ous song of humanity as it marches through 
the forests and valleys of the West, cutting the 
timber that obstructs its way into school-houses 
and churches, sweeping back the wolf and the 
deer, the buffalo and the bear, that instead of 
their howl and tramp, the air may be stirred 
with the eloquence of the caucus and the music 
of the choir, bidding the wild torrents and the 
fresh vapors hiss, and the implements of cunning 



JULY 5, 1852. 39 

labor fly, in compacting a civilization that com- 
bines freedom, culture, and religion, until the 
spirit that stepped upon the Plymouth sands is 
greeted by his grandchild at the Rocky Moun- 
tains and the free charter of California, — God 
save it from the disgrace of ever being other 
than free ! — emblazons in the sight of China the 
principles caught from Faneuil Hall. 

The human race has never, before this expe- 
rience of the West, had the opportunity to show 
what results, in the way of organization, it 
could work if left alone. 

One branch of the Christian Church in Europe 
throws its influence for the forces of despotism, 
on the ground that the human race itself is 
not equal to the production and maintenance of a 
new and beneficient institution. It affirms that the 
uninspired intellect of man is essentially anarchi- 
cal, and that God has fixed by his own wisdom 
the forms of the family, the nobility, the throne, 
and the church, as the safeguards of all the 
peace that is possible; beyond which, if the ir- 
reverent ambition of man would stray, it ordains 
confusions and sins against Heaven. There is 
something sublime in the positive audacity of 
this theory, and humanity pleads against it with 
a rhetoric equally sublime. She brings deep lat- 



40 ORATION. 

itudes and wide longitudes of liberty to answer 
it; she points to Cincinnati and Indianapolis, to 
a country between Lake Huron and Lake Michi- 
gan, to Wisconsin and Iowa, to the institutions 
that look down into the Pacific from the head- 
lands of the Golden State and the Oregon, 
which have grown up without noise into order and 
prosperity, during the lifetime of the generations 
that have made Europe restless with throes for 
liberty, and while the logic has been promul- 
gated which defames the popular power. Will 
it be said by the partisans of the theory in 
question that Providence has inspired the Ameri- 
cans for this work ? Then Providence does not 
patronize despotism in the nineteenth century; 
and if our western countrymen have had no aid 
of inspiration, then the theory falls, for new 
institutions can grow out of, and rest upon, the 
popular mind. 

On the continent of Europe, there is at 
this moment no political organization of men. 
They are agglomerated by force. They are 
heaped and crowded into tyrannical condi- 
tions, where their loves, reverences, and ideas 
will not suffer them to combine; government there 
bears the same relation to an organization that 
clay packed into a mould bears to a crystal. 



JULY 5, 1852. 41 

The elements of modern civilization have always 
been jumbled there, and every effort which they 
have made of late for proper development and har- 
monious reconstruction has been met by lines of 
bayonets and blaze of cannon. It is well, there- 
fore, that against the philosophy which supports 
the despots of the eastern world there should 
have arisen in our own day the magnificent 
refutation of the West; that the depths of our 
forests and the sweep of our prairies, should 
have answered the frown of St. Petersburg and 
the taunt of the Vatican, by a civilization 
whose rise is spotted with no drop of blood, 
and whose proportions show that the genius of 
our race, unhampered by despots, does know how 
to organize liberty in solid fact and vigorous law. 
As we speak of the West, the subject itself, 
no less than our instinctive sympathy and sor- 
row, dictates an expression of respect and ven- 
eration for the memory of the statesman and 
the orator, whose worn frame, — the silent shrine 
of a rare, electric soul — will soon be laid for 
perpetual rest in that beloved soil. When his 
eyes first saw the light, the wilderness was 
scarcely broken, which, rapidly filling with hardy 
settlers, he helped in his early manhood to cover 
with American laws, and which, as a rising 



42 ORATION. 

State, he represented in the national councils, 
and glorified by his patriotism, his eloquence, his 
statesmanship, and a power of personal influence 
rarely equalled, and never, probably, surpassed. 

" From the charmed council to the festive board, 
Of human feelings the unbounded lord; 
In whose acclaim the loftiest voices vied, 
The praised — the proud — who made his praise their 
pride." 

The business of eulogy is not for me or for 
this time. But the workings of American in- 
stitutions can hardly find clearer and more 
brilliant illustration than in the fact that he, 
the great commoner, the Chatham of the Re- 
public, was the child of poverty and the builder 
of his own greatness, rising early by the force 
of genius to a sway of men, more powerful 
than any titled autocrat can claim; and leaving 
such a vacancy as he sinks into his grave, that 
for thousands and hundreds of thousands in our 
land, the joy of this jubilee is dimmed by the 
thought that its dawning light and mid-day 
splendor fall upon the pale brow, the pulseless 
heart, the unnerved hand, and death-locked lips 
of Henry Clay.* 

* Henry Clay was born in Hanover County, Va., 12 April, 1777, and died 
in Washington, D.C., 29 June, 1852. 



JULY 5, 1852. 43 

Thus it has been the great distinction of our 
country that it has been the home of a more 
marvellous building capacity than any other land 
can show. Without having given to the world 
a single new work of much value to illumine 
the dark regions of social science, it has peopled 
a continent with institutions of which the pro- 
jection in literature would have been denounced 
by lovers of order as a licentious and destruc- 
tive dream. Nay, even for the best works that 
analyze and illustrate our own institutions, the 
American student is compelled to look abroad. 

We are often stigmatized as a boasting 
people, too subject to gusts of extravagant 
impulses, too fond of exaggerated rhetoric, too 
much in love of showy and flattering words, 
and therefore at the mercy of the loose-tongued 
demagogue. We know on what aspects of 
society these charges are founded, but where 
is the people that in proportion to its talk has 
done so much that time will not attack ? But 
may we not claim it as a glorious distinction 
of our people, that though they are more than 
patient of florid rhetoric in the caucus and on 
the stump, they have always been distrustful 
of it in the Senate Chamber ? that they have 
always been wary of organizing declamation or 



44 ORATION. 

flighty theory into a code ? and that, so far as the 
attitude of the state towards new measures and 
other countries is concerned, it has been de- 
termined, not by whirlwinds of sentiment, but 
by cool reflection and sharp debates ? 

We may proudly hold it up as the peculiarity 
of our republic, that the people revere still the 
stiff speech of a statute more than they delight 
in frothy garrulities of fancy; and that before the 
plan of a demagogue can claim the sanction of 
those solemn words " be it enacted," it must pass 
through more refining processes than the heat of 
a caucus, and be hammered by some discussion 
that is solid with common sense. The men who 
hold the pens that write our statutes are gen- 
erally organizers rather than dreamers and 
declaimers; and there is no more striking char- 
acteristic of our society than the fact that the 
gusty breath of a continental democracy has 
imparted so little instability and fluctuation to 
the laws. 

The instructions which these thoughts fur- 
nish are simple and obvious. First, gratitude to 
the Providence that decreed this soil to men 
whose experiments for liberty were guided by a 
constructive instinct and a courageous prudence, 
rather than to men of more daring speculation 



JULY 5, 1852. 45 

and feebler hands. Who cannot see how much 
more has been done for liberty beyond our 
shores, by the slow and solid growth of insti- 
tuted freedom here, than could have been done 
if the first million of inhabitants which our soil 
nourished, breaking up their homes, had returned 
to the Old World as crusaders against oppres- 
sion ? How fortunate that such myriads of 
Germans and Celts can come here and find not 
only the land welcoming them, but the home- 
steads and architecture of beneficent and tested 
institutions offering them protection ! What if 
our past could be forgotten, and the millions 
of foreigners who press through our harbors 
toward the setting sun, were obliged to build 
their liberties as well as their log huts; to 
cultivate and organize the freedom they are to 
enjoy ! How much less peace, how much less 
prosperity, would fall to their lot, than they 
now come in possession of, as inheritors of the 
principles and the consummate statesmanship of 
our Saxon builders in the past ? 

The mission of our land is still the path of 
organization, not aggressive propagandism or 
military interference. Let its influence be felt, in 
the lines of just and holy law, by process of 
construction through moral forces in favor of a 



46 ORATION. 

higher national morality; by forcible protests 
against oppressive interference on the part of 
other nations in violation of the international 
code, but still with the dignity that shows the 
desire to keep the posture of peaceful friend- 
ship and practical instruction towards the Euro- 
pean world. 

Our responsibility to the oppressed of other 
lands is a deeper one than that of furnishing 
ammunition and supplies; it is the responsibility 
of faithfulness here to republican ideas, and of 
progress in the path suggested by the prompt- 
ings of our history and the beckonings of Provi- 
dence. Every noble institution we build up 
here is a more encouraging beacon to the 
struggling people of Europe than the fire-light 
of war. The striking off of each new fetter 
here resounds cheeringly through Europe. A 
musical tone travels much farther than a growl; 
and the effluence of a righteous victory of 
freedom on our shores will reach farther at 
last, and work more benefit for other races, 
than the sputter of our musketry in Trieste, and 
the roar of our floating batteries on the Danube. 
Let us not doubt that the wiping out of an 
oppressive statute in our code somehow makes 
the throne of Nicholas less firm. And all the 



JULY 5, 1852. 47 

prosperity, stability, and peace with which we 
invest the possession of freedom hasten the 
doom of foreign bondage, for they shed a light 
and a fragrance into the public sentiment that 
will guide the footsteps and revive the courage 
of the army of liberty in Europe, and they 
shame the lies that would brand republicanism 
as anarchy. 

We have sent directly no ideas and no literature 
across the ocean to stir the popular heart to re- 
sistance, or to stimulate its aspirations; our influ- 
ence has gone silently out from our institutions. 
The principle is as true with nations as in private 
life which Portia uttered, when she caught the 
gleam from home — 

" How far that little candle throws its beams ! 
So shines a good deed in a naughty world." 

Despotism entrenches itself behind our errors 
and sins almost as securely as behind its own 
artillery. Let us make our Union a cluster of 
Christian Commonwealths, and the death-knell of 
Absolutism is struck by the decree that makes 
character the highest force in civilization. 

And so the second lesson of our theme warns 
us and beseeches us, as patriots and as lovers 
of the world, to go on in the work of organi- 



\ 



48 ORATION. 

zation. Our fathers have left us a work to 
do. We are no spiritual children of theirs if 
we believe that all which is desirable, and can 
be made safely operative in society, has been 
embodied here; and plainly enough there are 
unfinished portions of their scheme which it is 
for our generation and those who come after 
us, to complete, out of reverence for their 
memory, adoration of the truth and love of 
mankind. 

If there is a race within our borders for which 
there is no organization of liberty, but upon 
whom the architecture of the Saxon institutions 
frowns like the sullen masonry of forts and jails; 
to whom their security is the security of the 
dungeon; and for whom the strength of law is 
the strength of bolts and chains: how plain is the 
call upon those of our people whose hands can help 
them, to consider their case in the light and by the 
methods of a practical and sinewy wisdom ! 

How plain is the call upon us to give up as 
miserable, vapid, and boyish, all the declamation 
which overlooks the rooted strength, and is weak 
enough to treat it as an idea which denunciation 
and rhetoric can expunge ; and to take hold of it as 
a problem of life, that may take generations perhaps 
to solve, but yet that must be solved, guided 



JULY5,1852. 49 

by the fixed principle that there must come the 
time when every human being who stands on 
American soil shall have rights that are hedged by 
friendly statutes, and a sacred freedom which the 
whole spirit of society is pledged to maintain. 

And in whatever way the spirit of social justice 
can be made to enter more deeply into our 
policy, or domesticate itself in new features of 
our code without disruption of order, — in plans 
of land reform, — in adjustments of the re- 
lations of labor, so that the laborer may be 
more efficiently a man, — in the projection of 
schemes for the safety and nurture of the perish- 
ing classes, — we are called on cautiously to make 
the experiment; and to show how far and with 
what results the forces of society may shoot out 
into regions that have hitherto been abandoned 
to grim laws of competition and caprices of 
private charity. 

The grandeur and worth of our institutions 
call on us, as the inheritors of them, to remem- 
ber the conditions, and inhale the spirit by 
which alone the most firmly founded organiza- 
tion can be upheld. It is a great thing that a 
body has been given, so symmetrical and so 
vigorous, for the shrine of freedom here; that 
the organization of muscles and of nerves, of 



50 ORATION. 

heart and brain, of limbs and bones, is so well 
balanced and so strong. But woe to us if we 
forget that every organism lives by inspiration, 
and by fresh breath, by regular activity and 
systematic food. We cannot maintain ourselves 
on the virtues of our fathers, nor support the 
frame of our freedom by glorying in their de- 
votion, any more than our physical constitution 
can live on the food of last week, or the air 
we breathed upon the mountains last year. To 
support liberty there must be the wise love of 
it; the steady absorption, through the morality 
and faith of the people, of those juices and 
energies which are to every form of society 
what the soul is to its material abode. 

Or if we are insensible to fear for the down- 
fall of our institutions, still let us remember 
that no nation can rely on the past for its 
attitude, its expression, and its character. A 
man inherits his physical frame; but though it 
be symmetrical as that of Apollo, or muscular 
as that of Hercules, it depends on his own 
spirit, his virtues or his vices, whether his 
countenance shall be charming or ugly, whether 
nobility or vulgarity shall stream from his 
features, and his influence be a help or a hinder- 
ance to the laws of good. And so a nation, 



JULY 5, 1852. 51 

though it have the most fitly woven texture 
of institutions for its body, must from its own 
ideal resources pervade them with a soul; and 
its beauty and nobleness will be judged by man- 
kind according to the expression with which it 
beams, the selfishness or the charity, the brutal 
force or the generous chivalry, which it repre- 
sents by its countenance among the brotherhood 
of states. 

Let us turn the instruction which our history 
furnishes, to trust in the capacity of the people 
for organization to another quarter; let us make 
it general and generous. Dispiriting estimates 
have become quite too common among us of 
the ability of the nations on the continent of 
Europe to take care of themselves. Alas ! if 
Americans are to swell the chorus which despots 
have led, that the best bulwarks of order in 
Italy, Germany, Hungary, and France are cannon 
and court-martials; that it is better to have the 
order of bayonets and the iron discipline of the 
camp, than to let the popular genius effervesce 
until it settles into wisdom; and if it is to go 
forth that we have more sympathy with the 
tramp of the Russian legions, as they tread out 
the flaming Magyar principles into the blood of 
the hearts that fed them, than we have in 



52 ORATION. 

Kossuth's power to establish there the institu- 
tions which the people love. Alas ! if because 
France has been cursed with a few mental 
fiends, who would build up a red republic, we 
are to look with complacency on the gambling 
tyranny that dictates a despotic constitution from 
the mouth of perjury, that steals by one trick of 
universal suffrage the chance to crush the right of 
representation and choke the press, that distributes 
the functions of government among epaulettes, 
and that graciously grants to the nations the right 
and the blessing of unrestricted trade. 

Where is the American spirit that should be 
nurtured by our institutions, if, in the very light 
of our history, we are to distrust the power of 
the people to organize better institutions for them- 
selves than the brain of a tyrant can devise ? 
Do you say that the path of revolution for 
Europe is a perilous and shaded way ? We 
know it. But the last spirit to be fostered in the 
American breast is that which would bring all 
the perils that may beset the popular effort 
for self-government into any comparison with 
the quiet maintained by unscrupulous despotism. 
Institutions like ours Europe may not be able 
to establish, may not devise, may not desire; a 
long and bloody storm may intervene between 



JULY 5, 1852. 53 

the overthrow of oppression and the organization 
of peace; but it is not for us to preach and 
nourish hopeless distrust of the ability of popular 
Europe, — if left for a generation, or for half a 
century, in the experiment of liberty, — to correct 
mistakes, to prune excesses, and to find the 
preparation for republicanism which we so ear- 
nestly talk about, but which will never be gained 
by living under the shadow of absolute thrones. 
And finally, we are warned by our history 
not to distrust the capacity of the human race 
to attain a social order upon the earth of a 
higher stamp than any yet secured. It is jus- 
tice which, thus far in human experience, has 
been heaving the foundations of society, that 
some of its principles may gain a solid place. 
The great struggle has been to balance the 
interests of the masses against the power of 
the few, so that nature might be, in some 
sense, a home for them, and existence a bless- 
ing. In the institution of such justice, at least 
for the white races, our land stands preeminent, 
far ahead of the nations that have gone before. 
Two centuries ago it would have seemed im- 
possible, Utopian, to the wisest statesman and 
thinkers of the other world, to realize on a 
scale such as this country now exhibits, such 



54 ORATION. 

a scheme of self-supporting, orderly and stable 
democracy. But there are dreams of men, yes, 
promises of a wisdom higher than man's, that 
this earth is yet to be the scene of organiza- 
tions nobler than those of justice, — organiza- 
tions of love. It is inspiring to think of some 
far-off centuries as destined to witness the 
birth, the progress, and the completion of such 
a blessing for our race. And, looking at our 
condition from the cruel feudal times, or from 
the level of a Patagonian degradation, such an 
organization of love upon the earth does not 
seem wholly a dream. And so this great value 
belongs to our history, that the philosophy of 
it helps our Christian hope. It makes prophecy 
seem more sober. It brings the rhetoric of 
Isaiah within the sympathy of common sense. 

It is a summit from which the thinker may 
look off, like Moses from the mount, upon new 
and charming fields lying sweet in the smile 
of Heaven, where the armies of humanity — that 
have come up out of the bondage of despotism, 
and marched with sadness, but with courage, 
through the wastes and the want of the desert 
of selfishness, — shall find a home, shall build 
amid plenty, and enjoy in peace; and the nations, 
bound into solidarity of life despite their varie- 



JULY 5, 1852. 55 

ties, — as the globe, with all its latitudes and 
zones, its polar and tropic climes, its mountains 
and prairies, its streams and seas, is organized 
into one physical republic, — K shall beat their 
swords into ploughshares and their spears into 
pruning-hooks," and praise the Creator through 
a life of song, labor, and prayer. 



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